Don't take this too seriously! I just ****ed around a text editor for an hour.

I had this thought that people experimenting with layouts typically want their strange new layout printed on the keys, and that means messing with stickers or something. At best, if you're learning one of the established alternatives (Dvorak, Colemak...) you might be able to get replacement keycaps, at a non-negligible price.

So I tried to make an alternative layout that you can mark on your keyboard by just switching your own Qwerty caps around. Meaning, all keys stay on their Qwerty row.

I didn't use a very strict methodology. I looked at some easily googleable data about letter sequence frequencies in American English and tried to fit stuff so it made sense.

With this, you're suposed to take up JKDA SHL' as your home position, not JKDA FSHL. This way there's one more key's worth of space between your hands. The keys in the very middle are harder to reach (so I put rare stuff there) but the right pinkie is relieved from covering a quarter of the keyboard.

Of course it makes sense, but it will be hard to get people to switch.Letter frequency is not all there is however. I think that keeping the most common bigraphs on the same hands are just as important as letter frequency. I find that I type faster when a word has more keys on one hand, and that most of my mistakes are from when words are split between hands and the hands have got out of sync with each other.

That's funny. I actively tried to split as many common sequences as I could so they alternate between the hands.

I find that most of my typos happen when breaking a chain of one-hand strokes too early. Like, I try to type thing but my idle left hand hurries up too much and makes it thign. Ideally I'd type most entire words with one hand, but that's never going to happen, so the next best thing (I figured) would be to alternate rhythmically as much as possible.

Edit: And, oh, right, I'm not even dreaming of actually getting a mass of people to switch. This is more like a curiosity aimed at the type of person who is actively looking for an alternative layout to try out. It's surely not the best out there, but if you're just curious, it removes one obstacle from your way (ie. key labelling).